


no matter how sweet, no matter how brave

by bruised_fruit



Series: headcanon compliant [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Self Esteem Issues, self injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2020-03-09 06:13:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18911197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bruised_fruit/pseuds/bruised_fruit
Summary: Lucretia only does it when she has the urge to write or draw something unimportant. It’s more articulate than anything she could put onto paper, and at the start of cycle three, it’s gone.





	no matter how sweet, no matter how brave

**Author's Note:**

> this is a repost. please don't read if it may be triggering

One cycle in, Lucretia decides that she’s alone. Not physically, of course. She has six crew mates, and she sees them every day. Talks to them, even. But in spite of that (or because of it), she is alone on the ship. Entirely and fully, and she’s trapped here. She won’t be _really_ talking to anyone for, well, forever. 

And that’s okay, isn’t it? It’s livable.

Her first existential crisis came in early childhood. She’d pulled herself together, easily, scratching at herself to the point of injury, and since then, she has a lot to hold herself together. A cohesive, functioning person, she writes, she draws, she does something physical. 

(Like bleed a little, when she has to.)

But she has it again and again, in the middle of conversation, even, a raw panic once she remembers who she is and what that means. On the ship, it’s harder than ever before.

Relationships are not Lucretia’s strong point. As interesting as people are, she’s never found comfort in discussion, touch, the stress of reading eyes and body language and adjusting herself in turn. The people around her are terrifying and unlikely to offer anything by way of support.

So when the Animal Kingdom is behind them, she cracks open two more notebooks for this cycle. And one more, for herself, that she’ll discard or destroy once she’s filled it.

She draws her father’s face. A childhood pet. An old lover. Her favorite food. What did she look like, before she got ugly? She didn’t take any childhood pictures with her.

Lucretia tries to draw that, too.

She works in her room, desperate. She’s happy to capture each world, they have such value. There isn’t any value to this, though; Lucretia plans to burn the notebook. But some juvenile part of herself _needs_ to draw it, to see it again. 

There’s this barrier, memory and ability, and even writing isn’t enough. A poem about playing in her family’s garden. A story, a recollection from elementary school. This is all frustrating to her. It’s fuzzy, and the more she tries, the fuzzier it gets.

Lucretia abandons personal journals quickly. There’s an existential question behind her journal keeping, anyway, because nothing will ever come of them, she decides. No one will read them. But it’s a habit, and her job, and it’s less frustrating than the type of documentation she’s ceased.

Davenport tells her he’s proud of her, that what she’s doing is important and useful, and she’s filled with an emotion that her personal journal would have held well.

She documents it on her body instead. It will go away without erasing, at the end of the cycle, is her logic when she’s pressing the blade of her pencil sharpening knife into her thigh.

Lucretia never cared about scars, back when she would trace a blade across her stomach in a reprieve from drafting someone else's staggering life story. But those thin, pale lines, barely visible, aren’t satisfying like what she knows she can get away with on the ship. It will reset, it doesn’t matter.

(It never mattered before, but now she's an adult and has the weight of the universe on her shoulders, partially, so it seems childish to dig a knife into herself every time she has a thought or feeling she doesn't want to deal with because she's weak and stupid and at least she won't have many reminders next cycle and thank god no one will ever notice because how miserable would that be?)

Any cost, imagined or tangible, is worth replacing wasting her paper, and a brief something akin to pleasure, a distraction from their pitiful existence, is. Well, it’s not good, but it’s _something_ , the opportunity to fill herself with distance, clarity, not feelings. She’s locked in her room, or her head, depending.

She carves a line for “Magnus died and I miss him” and one for “fucked up a conversation with Lup and Taako and I’m sure they hate me.” One, in the dead of night and in a moment of utter immaturity, for “I miss my family.” Something about it feels mechanical, functional, the same type of satisfaction that comes with a well-written summary of the agricultural system on the current cycle in her journals or her brief but meticulous daily record of the crew’s actions.

This is controlled. Lucretia only does it when she has the urge to write or draw something unimportant. It’s more articulate than anything she could put onto paper, and at the start of cycle three, it’s gone.  

(It’s satisfying to slice in, again, to largely unmarked flesh, for “Barry and Davenport passed me over for a scouting party,” even though it hadn’t taken her by surprise. What surprises her in the calm after is how _good_ it had felt.)

She’s been in her room a lot this cycle, but no one notices or cares. It doesn’t get in the way of her work. Lucretia goes out enough to fill the journals, comprehensive and careful.

(“I’m completely useless,” is a thought she doesn’t have to analyze, because she cuts instead.)

She wonders if anyone will ever look at her journals, if anything the crew does is even helping, if the mission will ever end, if she will be part of it then. She desperately wishes she wasn’t sentient. This thought is compartmentalized in the loveliest of ways when Lup is biting at her, fucking her so hard that Lucretia is almost blank, almost in bliss but edged, emotionally, until the next moment alone, when she can get rid of whatever built up.

And Lucretia is grateful for Magnus, the solace of the only IPRE member who could possibly understand her (but he doesn’t, of course he doesn’t). He’s like the softest, gentlest rock against her, and it’s not his fault that their shared insignificance isn’t enough and she has the urge to seek out pain while they’re fucking, even.

(While she has one of them touching her regularly, she switches to her upper arm, an odd place to be touched by a lover. She makes a conscious effort to cut more shallowly. Pinpointing exactly why would be hard for her.)  
  
Lucretia dies cycle six, and it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as she’d hoped. And the crew did just fine without her, she finds out once she’s come back, Barry and Davenport even filled out the rest of her journal with daily logs, notes and sketches of the planet.

(She’s so unimportant, she’s starting to love it, she’s thinking while she’s hurting herself one night, and then she remembers that she’s doing this so she doesn’t have to think.)

It’s grounding in the worst way, like when she remembers she’s a person while she’s around someone’s fist, and Lucretia nearly throws up. She doesn’t want to _think_ , to remember what’s happening and who she is. And it hurts so much, which is infuriating, because this isn’t supposed to hurt, not really.

She feels raw, in the middle of cycle seven, sitting at the kitchen table with Merle, Magnus, and Lup while Taako cooks. She observing, watching them, writing about the plants she and Merle had gathered with Lup today. Lucretia isn’t a part of the conversation, but she wishes she could be.

(No she doesn't, of course she doesn't, she wants to be alone and making herself bleed.) 

When Merle makes a joke at her and laughs, she wonders if she’ll ever do that for him. She’s fond of them, she’s fond all of them. But she isn’t part of them, she’s alone, is what she reminds herself in her room later, the blade of the knife dragging lightly across her thighs. And she puts it away for the night.

Those tentative attempts to force herself to take refuge in people, the crew members around her, from the solid and quiet companionship she was always afraid she didn't deserve to a dangerous and unstable love so passionate and close to what she’d ask for if she knew how to ask, well, they aren’t enough, of course, and she takes the knife out again and again, the new normal when things aren't even all that bad. The red of her blood is calming, and Lucretia feel like she can breathe again, her mind blessedly blank.

Filling her unfillable void of existence is people and the physical, and she starts to paint _them_ , it’s her new thing leading into 21. Because she cares about her crew, and they act like they care about her, hands on her back, soft compliments. 

(As much as it helps her, it is barely enough to hold her back, to slow her just a little.) 

When Lup falls in love with Barry, she expected it, practically. And Lucretia still loves the both of them, still loves the entire crew, as solid and as real as the lines scars that disappear with each cycle. She’s so grateful that the six of them stay with her.

So in 65, she doesn’t paint them. She barely writes at all. She’s terrified, and the knife digging into any expanse of flesh she can find is the only thing keeping her sane, she tells herself.

It isn’t a surprise to herself that after she locks Davenport’s door in cycle 99, she’s tracing neat line after line across her stomach. No one will see it, no one will know how stupid and weak she is, that she can’t cope any other way, but she’s clearing her head right now, she’s trying not to think, remembering it will all be worth it as long as she doesn’t write this part down. 

Lucretia tells herself that it doesn’t matter that she’s broken her captain, because she will fix him. She will lose him forever, but at least he will be whole again. She takes comfort in visiting the few crew members she can keep track of, fights to numb herself to how fully she’s broken all of them. There is something fundamentally wrong with Taako now, and Merle seems empty even with his new family. Magnus loves Julia so much more than he ever loved her, and it’s okay, it’s okay, she knew this could happen, she knew it would happen, a blade pressed into herself while Davenport sleeps one room over.

She feels alive in Wonderland, and she hopes she'll die there. Until she remembers Davenport, and the 20 years she’s shaved off of herself incite _fear_. It’s visceral, and powerful, and enough to force herself to force her way back to him, her dimly lit room, and a knife to remind herself she was mortal from the start, it doesn’t matter, she just has to fix it all first.   

There is a break in the pattern when she finds Maureen. Maureen is unexpected, warm and safe and _wonderful,_ and Davenport trusts her, so Lucretia’s happy to pull her in. 

(As a distraction? That’s everything, at this point.)

She hadn’t realized she’d ever be with someone other than a human who couldn’t recognize even the most obvious magic or an elf steeped in her own, and she’s terrified when shortly into their relationship, her tiny spell comes up in a quiet moment between schematics and sleep. 

"What are you wearing a glamour for?" Maureen asks her, more hurt than curiosity in her voice. Instead of answering, Lucretia pulls her into a kiss. But there is no distracting her that night, eyes shining in the dark when she asks again.

"It's nothing," Lucretia tells her, because she never thought to prepare for this kind of conversation. Her ears are ringing, but it’s necessary, she _needs_ it, because not processing is a matter of survival to her at this point.

(And it feels good. And she’s afraid.) 

She says, "It's nothing" the next time, too, when Maureen's fingers run over the raised skin on her stomach, too precise and extensive to be anything else.

And a couple months later, it stops coming up, but it's an unspoken concern the whole time they're together, until Maureen dies and it doesn't matter at all what Lucretia does to her body as long as it’s intact enough to ensure she can collect the rest of the relics and cast the spell.

She can't remember the last time she went so long without it, she thinks absentmindedly when she's done.

After she sees her friends for the first time, it’s almost instinct to tear into her skin back in her quarters. And again, after Barry possesses a BOB member, after they’ve left for Wonderland, after Davenport sees her blood seeping through a shirt and she senses worry in the urgent “Davenport” he squawks out.

It’s okay, is what she tells herself. It _is_. Physical pain holds her together, it’s all about control.  
  
(She’s so blindly desperate for it every moment she’s _not_ that her head might explode. It’s what keeps _her_ in control, keeps her from thinking so much she’ll fall apart.)  
  
She does it much less than she used to, but with much more intent. 

After they have ostensibly saved the world, Davenport is standing in her office, and he’s saying goodbye for probably the last time. Lucretia’s mind is busy, clouded. She can’t hear him. She wants her knife.

“I feel responsible,” Davenport says, staring into her eyes.

_For what? For what I did to you?_

He is impassive, as always, and it's impressive, all things considered. Lucretia has always hated that, but then again, she also tends to hate conversations she can read. She knows he’ll get on a ship, that she’ll never see him again. Every minute he’s spent with her since he regained his memory has been excruciating for him, she knows.

(She’s stupid, but she knows the crew like the back of her hand. Seven horribly overlapping lines, to knock up against in the dark when she doesn’t have the energy for a better kind of hurt.)

“Just promise me you’ll be safe, Lucretia,” he says, and his face has an expression so familiar to her that she nearly recoils.

Lucretia’s throat is dry, and she says, “After everything, I don’t think you should worry about me, captain.” 

Davenport’s face is too soft, caring – she wants to tear herself open, she wouldn’t mind if he did it, and if Maureen was here to guilt her into thinking this was wrong, she wouldn’t listen. 

“It was my job,” he says, breaking eye contact, finally. “You seemed so alone, so distrustful, and I never did anything.” 

“You did fine.”

She’s always been the worst crew member, useless and miserable. She knows she’s always disappointed Davenport, like a thorn in his side, and she’s only been worse to him in this century. Lucretia has the composure of the Director, now, and three decades she wishes she could lord over him. She just wants the conversation to end. Wants to see blood, the reassurance of an old friend.  

“It wasn’t enough,” Davenport says, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Please, Lucretia,” he looks back at her again, and something twists in her gut, “just stay safe. You’re a good person.”

She’s not sure why he’s talking like this when he hates her so much. He is _happy_ once he’s away from her, and Lucretia processes it all with what will surely turn into hypertrophic scars. 

The crew members that she hasn’t alienated completely tell her they forgive her. Magnus and Lup and Barry, who wouldn’t dare to love her anymore, but smile at her over her stone of farspeech and invite her to dinner. She can see through that, especially while she knows Davenport’s just holding back from expressing the rage and hurt that Taako was happy to show her and Merle cannot.

Forgiveness wasn’t something that she was looking for, and sometimes she tells herself that, as a reminder. Lucretia wouldn’t offer it to herself, so it’s laughable that anyone would still pretend to want her in their lives.

She’s ruined enough (and certainly, she’s ruined herself), and that’s a mantra for herself in the dark Bureau office, alongside the security of her longest-lasting habit.

 

**Author's Note:**

> title from[ "the sword & the pen"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSLDUqPLe4s) by regina spektor


End file.
